Ordinary diners who take part in our annual survey each spring review restaurants and leave their feedback, but we also ask them to score restaurants from 1-5 on food, service and ambience. Harden’s then uses an average of these scores and measures them against other establishments in the same price bracket to arrive at the ratings published in the guide and online.

Snippets from some of your feedback may end up in the overall Harden’s review, noticeably they appear in “double quotation marks”. The rest of our pithy, bite-sized restaurant summaries are compiled by analysing the survey data and extracting recurring themes, looking at whether or not a venue was nominated in any of our categories – like ‘favourite’ or ‘most overpriced’ – and, of course, looking at the ratings for food, service and ambience.

The Harden’s ratings indicate that a restaurant is:

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All reviews are compiled from survey comments and ratings, without any regard for our own personal opinions, except in cases where restaurants are too new to have been included in the survey. If you want the editors’ view on new restaurants in London you can find them in our Editors’ Review section.

News

Cathedral city pie shop

High-flying young chef Danny Gill has returned to his home town of Lincoln to buy the pie shop where he first worked as a 15-year-old kitchen porter.

Brown’s Pie Shop, around the corner from the city’s cathedral, is a Steep Hill institution that celebrates its 50th anniversary next year. Described in the latest Harden’s Survey as “a taste of old England”, it was taken over by Gill’s parents Allan and Christine after he left home to train in some of England’s smartest kitchens.

Having bought his parents out, 30-year-old Gill says it has been an emotional home-coming to take over a business with such personal and family as well as local heritage. It is also a big stylistic change for a chef who worked in Raymond Blanc’s Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons and Daniel Clifford’s Midsummer House in Cambridge, graduating to head chef at Roussillon (RIP) in Pimlico and Clifford’s gastropub the Flitch of Bacon.

“It’s a good time for me to change, and I think the public is looking for more casual dining these days,” he said. “I’m not going to rush into too many changes – I want Brown’s to be here for another 50 years.

“But I still have my dreams and ambitions for it. I can hardly believe what’s happened – I really did wash the pots and pans here 15 years ago, and now I’ve come back as managing director.”